Chapter XIX: In the Lion’s Den

To understand the rest of this episode, you must know something about the divorce laws of New York, and about divorce procedure. The code of the State, which was framed by a combination of Puritan bigotry with Roman Catholic obscurantism, requires infidelity legally proven. The defendant cannot confess, and neither party to the suit can testify against the other; moreover, if it appears that both have desired the divorce or consented to the divorce, there is “collusion” and the divorce is not granted. These laws are administered by judges who are almost invariably corrupt, many of them in addition being under the spell of Catholic superstition, considering that they have decreased the period of their sojourn in purgatory when they succeed in twisting the law or the evidence so as to balk some person’s desire to be free from marital disharmony.

Into this jungle of ravening beasts and poisonous serpents I now walked, unarmed and unprotected—having made the mistake of employing a lawyer who was a sensitive and honorable gentleman. The Court appointed a referee to hear the case, and before this referee I appeared with my counsel and my witnesses; also there appeared the counsel for the other party, as required by law, and a solemn farce was played. The referee had got the case as a morsel of graft from the infamous Tammany machine; whether he was malicious or merely ignorant, I do not know, but he was evidently possessed with curiosity concerning the notorious scandal, and questioned me concerning my attitude toward the matters in evidence—how I had regarded them and what I had done about them. My attorney objected that under the law I was not permitted to testify concerning my wife’s conduct, but the referee insisted that I should answer his questions, and for fear of angering him, and possibly exciting his suspicions, I answered.

Under the law it was provided that all this testimony should be secret, the property of the Court. My attorney and the attorney for the other party demanded of the referee and of the clerk of the Court that the law should be obeyed. But when the referee’s report was handed in, a full account of it and of the testimony was published in every newspaper in New York. When inquiry was made by my attorney, it developed that twenty-six different clerks had had access to those papers, and it was not possible to determine which one of the twenty-six had accepted a bribe from the newspapers. Suffice it to say that the whole obscene story was spread before the world. I say “obscene”—it was that of necessity, you understand; the New York State divorce law requires it to be that, literally. The law requires that the witnesses must have seen something tending to prove a physical act of infidelity; and if they shrink from going into detail, the referee compels them to go into detail—and then the details are served as delicious tidbits by the “yellow” journals.

I waited a month or two in suspense and shame, until at last the august judge handed down his decision. The referee had erred in questioning me as to the other party’s actions and my attitude thereto; therefore the referee’s recommendations were not accepted, and another referee must be appointed and the solemn farce must be gone through with a second time. I observed with bewildered interest that the erring referee was not compelled to return to me the money which the law had compelled me to turn over to him as his share of the “swag.” I must pay another referee and a new set of court costs, and must wait several months longer for my peace of soul and self-respect to be restored to me.

The second referee was appointed and the farce was played again. This time the referee would make no mistake, he would ask me no questions; he was a business-like gentleman, and put the job through in short order. He turned in his report, with the recommendation that my petition should be granted; and again the newspapers got the story—only now, of course, it was a stale story, the public was sick of the very name of me.

Again I waited in an agony of suspense, until a Roman Catholic judge handed down his august decision. It appeared that the evidence in the case was defective. The other party had been identified by means of photographs, and this was not admissible. Both attorneys in the case and the referee declared that there were innumerable precedents for photographs having been admitted, but the Roman Catholic judge said no. Also he said that there was some indication of “collusion”; I had behaved too humanely towards the other party in the domestic conflict. Apparently it was my legal duty to behave like Othello, or to do what the relatives of Héloïse did to Abélard.

I understood, of course, what the decision meant; the Roman Catholic judge had got his opportunity to step upon the nose of a notorious Socialist, and he had taken it. My lawyer urged me to appeal the case, but I remembered a talk I had had with James B. Dill three or four years previously. Dill was the highest paid corporation-lawyer in America, having been paid a million dollars for organizing the Steel Trust. Before he died, he was judge of the highest court of New Jersey, and I had spent long evenings at his home listening to his anecdotes. I recalled one remark: “There are twenty-two judges of the Appellate Court in New York State, and only three of them are honest. To each of the other nineteen I can say, I know whose man you are; I know who paid you and just how he paid you. And not one of them would be able to deny my statements.” Reflecting on this, I decided that I would not spend any more of my hard-earned money in appealing—more especially as by so doing I stood to lose what little privacy the law had preserved to me; the law required that in the event of an appeal I must pay to have the evidence in the case printed, and made public property forever! I had received a letter from my friend Dr. Frederik van Eeden, the Dutch poet and novelist, assuring me that he lived in a civilized country, where divorce was granted upon admission of infidelity, without evidence being given. So I set out for Holland; and in establishing my residence I did not have to resort to any technicalities. I really intended to spend the rest of my life in Europe; it seemed to me that I could not bear the sight of America again.

My earning power had, of course, been entirely destroyed; no one would read my books, no one would publish what I wrote. As Mitchell Kennerley said to me: “If people can read about you for one cent, they are not going to pay a dollar and a half to do it.” Also, my health seemed permanently undermined; I did not think I was going to live, and I did not very much care. But I established my residence in Holland and obtained my divorce, quietly, and without scandal. I wish to pay tribute to the kindest and most friendly people I have ever met—the Dutch. When I came to them, sick with grief, they did not probe into my shame; they invited me to their drawing-rooms for discussions of literature and art, and with tact and sweetness they let me warm my shivering heart at their firesides. Their newspapers treated me as a man of letters—an entirely new experience to me. They sent men of culture and understanding to ask my opinions, and they published these opinions correctly and with dignity. When I filed my divorce-suit they published nothing. When the decree was granted, they published three or four lines about it in the columns given to court proceedings, a bare statement of the names and dates, as required by law. And even when I proposed to rid my home of fleas by means of cyanogen gas, they did not spread the fact on the front pages of their newspapers, making it a “comic relief” story for the vacuous-minded crowd.

There were many men in Holland, as in England and Germany and Italy and France, who hated and feared my Socialist ideas. I made no secret of my ideas; I spoke on public platforms abroad, as I had spoken at home. When reporters for the great Tory newspapers of England came to interview me, I told them of the war that was coming with Germany, and how bitterly England would repent her lack of education and modern efficiency, and her failure to feed and house her workers as human beings. These opinions were hateful to the British Tories, and they attacked me; but they did not attack the author of the opinions, by making him into a public scarecrow and publishing scandals about his private life. This, as my Dutch chemist would have said, is “a characteristically American procedure”!